January 27, 2018

... so many people in China are fond of the Japanese game app Tabi Kaeru — Travel Frog — in which you gather clover for a cute cartoon frog who leaves but eventually returns with photos and mementos from some trip. The NYT reports that the game is very easy:

"You don’t need to do a lot of things, you don’t even need to think about anything,” said Yu Ting, a 28-year-old accountant in the northeastern city of Tianjin. “It’s not a competitive game, so it’s very relaxing.”

The game also has a strong connection to child rearing. Before the frog leaves on a trip, you have to pack its lunch. And in Chinese, the word for “frog,” wa, is a homophone for a word for “baby.”

“My friends and I all call the frogs our ‘frog sons,’ ” said Gao Lang, 22, a graduate student in Beijing. “After raising this frog, I suddenly understand the feeling of being a parent, at least partly. And I think when I am traveling somewhere far in the future, I will try to send some photos to my parents.”

It is available in the Google Play store if one is curious to see what they're talking about. Lots of guessing for those who don't read Chinese. Suggested in the store for those looking at the frog game is Purrrfect Spirits, a game about cute cats and ghosts.

Interesting that both China and Japan are trying to get young people to emerge from their solitary, virtual lives and experience real lives. From what the futurists tell us, though, virtual is the future. Sad.